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Shannon
McMahon uses this, and the next few chapters, to personify what’s wrong with deal qualification and inspection. He continues with the QBR as the setting to develop his characters who tell the story of how enterprise software sales is screwed up. You have to read the book to appreciate the pyscho-emotional landscape of a business review that McMahon conveys so well. For our purposes, we’re looking for ops and enablement data lessons.
First up is Shannon. She presents some of her deals in forecast that managers and leaders in the room ask questions while the author interjects commentary that highlights the brokenness of the process. We’re introduced to the concepts and terms that become the substance of the book later, like Champion and Coach, process and stages. The text portrays a typical deal review with managers and leaders asking a bevy of ad-hoc, reactive, and–what McMahon calls–“superficial” questions that receive mostly unsatisying answers. The review ends with the rep, Shannon, calling a forecast amount just below her quota “with a shot at” full quota. McMahon makes it clear that there’s nothing substantive about her forecast.
Classic.
Although the book uses a quarterly business review as the setting, some of us have lived this nightmare every week.
Again, the book is setting up context and working to adequately illustrate the problem. We won’t get too far into solutioning for revenue success and data just yet. But in the spirit of motivating solutions, let’s call out the obvious problems:
- Inaccuracy. There’s nothing to support the forecasted amount.
- Inefficiency. Even if it was accurate, there’s way too many words exchanged, time and energy consumed, to get to the simple, object of desire: the forecast.
And here were are. Inefficient inaccuracy is the epitome of waste in a business process. Measuring variance and error in predictions is bread-and-butter to data science. McMahon proposes a way to fix all this, and we’ll look at ways to support those fixes because process and data exist at the core of revenue success.
Before we move on to the upcoming chapters where we meet Carlos, Kathleen, and Hannlin, I think it’s worth the one big lesson from Shannon’s time at the podium:
- Consistent format with a minimum expectation of completeness. The deal details should be presented in consistent way. Certain data points should be required. As we work through the book, we’ll fill in what those details should be. This could be a preso template, preferably something that can be generated from CRM details so that reps are not having to type anything twice. But, of course this would mean that the information is already in the CRM.